Homework help requested (not what you think!)

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Joel Goldstick
<joel.goldstick at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a book : http://inventwithpython.com/  Invent Your Own Computer
> Games with Python
> which claims to teach people to program games in python.  I haven't read it,
> but it seems to be for beginning programmers.  Take a look.. Maybe it would
> work for your kids.

Not my siblings specifically, but I've seen this happen elsewhere quite a bit.

Thing is, they still won't be making the next Call of Duty Black Ops,
or Alice: Madness Returns, or even the next Angry Birds. It's like
looking at the roads and how car manufacturers produce things that run
from here to Sydney, and then learning how to build a go-kart with
wooden wheels - strong disappointment in the scale of achievement.
Which is a pity, because that go-kart can be a lot of fun; the novice
programmer has to get past that disappointment and discover the other
fun aspects of coding, like the ability to improve your own
environment. (At work, one of my most useful oddments of code is a log
tailing system that runs on each of N remote servers and effectively
runs "tail -F foo.log" for each of M log files, tags the lines with
the hostname and log file name, and sends it to a single display on my
computer. Makes my job easier to the extent that I probably paid off
the time investment within a week, but it's hardly glamorous stuff.)

ChrisA